You’ve heard of the best of both worlds, well get ready for the worst of three. Down in Vauxhall in London, three artists have mashed themselves together to create the most revolting visual soup imaginable, an exhibition that isn’t so much the sum of its parts as a total negation of anything good any of them has ever done.
Whatever qualities YBA kingpin Damien Hirst and street artists Shepard Fairey and Invader might have, none of them are on display in this staggeringly vast exhibition – it just goes on and on, huge room after huge room filled with aesthetic crap.
Triple Trouble … collaborative works by Shepard Fairey, Damien Hirst, and Invader. Photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd/Artworks © the artists
The show is made up largely of collaborations between the artists, Hirst’s dots and medical cabinets smashed brutally and heinously together with Invader’s little ceramic aliens and Fairey’s leaden posterised Photoshoppery.
There’s a wall of Fairey’s Obey logo plastered over Hirst spin and flower paintings, adding nothing to something that wasn’t good to start with.
My jaw dropped when I saw the huge Hirst formaldehyde case with an invader alien drowning in the blue fluid – it was like walking in on a crime scene. Why would you go to such lengths to create something that no one comes out of well, that expresses both artists’ ideas so poorly?
Alien in formaldehyde … ‘my jaw dropped’. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
And somehow, it only gets worse. A medical cabinet filled with Obey-logo pills, diamanté-encrusted Space Invaders, grim butterfly paintings with some ludicrous Fairey propaganda woman staring out at you, countless 8-bit pixelated portraits of Lou Reed and Sid Vicious. It’s as if someone let the most annoying teenager you’ve ever met make some art. At one point there’s an enormous triple portrait featuring what might be Malala Yousafzai and Miley Cyrus plastered with scalpel blades. It’s all juvenile, dumb, silly imagery that does not work on any level.
Would this have been better as solo presentations of each artist’s work? Maybe. But Invader’s work is built for the street, not the gallery, that’s where it’s meant to be, where it works best. And Fairey’s work is built for the bin. Getting up close and personal with it just rams home how ugly, one-dimensional, faux-political and stupid it is.
No power … Shepard Fairey during an exhibition photo call at Newport Street Gallery. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
It’s all precision-engineered to sell, in vast quantities at vast prices, to people with the worst taste on Earth. And the reason this is so spectacularly naff is that Hirst is important, he’s made vital, powerful art. Regardless of whether or not you like any of these artists, all three have something that they’re good at, but no one bothered to put any of that in this show (curated by Hirst’s son Connor). Take Invader off the street, or Fairey off the front of sweatshirts, and you strip them of their power. Take the ideas out of Hirst, and you strip him of his purpose.
Everyone here was so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. And they shouldn’t.
